Janine Butcher
Janine Moon (nee Butcher, previously Evans and Malloy) was a pivotal character on the UK series, EastEnders. After being played by child actors Rebecca Michael from 1989-1993 and Alexia Demetriou from 1993-1996, she was played as an adult by Charlie Brooks from 1999-2014. She would leave a couple times, returning to the role until 2014, when she was written off for good. Nasty bit of work! Janine is the youngest of the four children of Frank Butcher (Mike Reid) and his first wife, June Simmonds. June died when Janine was four years old and was sent off to live with her oldest sister, Clare. Frank would move to the London Borough of Walford with Janine's older siblings, Diane and Ricky. At that point, he would marry Pat Evans (the true love of his life, and the woman he cheated on June with), and they would take up residence in the Queen Vic. In 1989, when she moved to Manchester, Clare sent Janine down to London to move in with her family. Because of Frank's bad parenting, Janine was one of the nastiest bits of work ever seen. In a lot of ways, Frank was more in approval of her behavior, because he too was quite a shady con artist and all around love rat. Like Father, like daughter! It was also shown that Janine was the favorite granddaughter of Frank's cantankerous mother, Mo (Edna Dore), but, as was often the case, she wasn't blind to the conniving that Janine could be capable of. It was clear from the outset that Janine and Pat did not get along at all. She was notorious for causing trouble to anyone and everyone. As a child, she threw tantrums, wet the bed, self-mutilated herself, and was a sleepwalker as well as a compulsive liar and a thief. After her father left, she was forced to stay with Pat, until 1996, when her father returned and they moved to Manchester. In 1999, she returned when Frank married Queen Vic landlady Peggy Mitchell. She aimed to cause trouble between the two and tried to break them up. She sleeps with Jamie Mitchell, a nephew of Peggy's, and then decided to spread rumors about his lack of sexual prowess. For that, she had flour dumped on her. Her treatment of Jamie would cause her to cross swords with Sonia Jackson (Natalie Cassidy), whom she disliked. Frank abandoned her after his marriage to Peggy was destroyed. She moved in with Terry Raymond and they started a real-estate business. Although he thought of her as a surrogate daughter, her manipulative behavior would test his patience. During that time, she developed a cocaine habit, dressed as his late daughter, Tiffany, seducing Terry (all the while she was also carrying on a relationship with Billy Mitchell, Peggy's relation) and having no remorse for what she did. At that point, Terry threw her out and left Walford once and for all. She later becomes a prostitute because she owed Lee Vickers, her cocaine dealer, a large amount of money. She would sleep with anyone, even Ian Beale, which earned her the wrath of his wife at the time, Laura. So furious was she at Janine that she threw a pan of boiling milk at her. This made Janine agoraphobic to the point where she was so afraid to go out of the house that she would eat dog food. Billy helped her overcome her agoraphobia. However, he was now in a relationship with Little Mo Slater (Kacie Ainsworth), and thus she began to try to derail that relationship, but she again fails in this. She would later fall for Barry Evans, the son of her stepmother's former husband, Roy, who had recently died and had inherited money from his will. A very greedy and money-mad woman, she did everything to try to con him, not to mention trying to steal any inheritance Pat received from Roy. She tried to steal the used car patch from Pat, even going so far as to put the painting of her beloved father in the office, but Pat would not allow it, and during a row over it, Pat hit Janine with it, putting her head through the canvas! Janine married Barry, but it was not a sincere marriage. She was also sleeping with Paul Trueman, and they were waiting for Barry to die so she could be the merry widow and cut her new lover in on the fortune. However, Barry had been given a clean bill of health, which annoyed Janine, so, after admitting that she did not love him and was only in it for the money, she shoved him off a cliff, whilst honeymooning in Scotland. He died and she inherited his money. To prevent his friends and family from paying their respects, the scheming widow has his body cremated with nobody's notice. Barry's ex-wife, Natalie Evans, became suspicious of this and she became close to Paul. She encouraged him to go to the police, and tell what he knew. Which he did and neatly put Janine in trouble. She would be duly arrested for Barry's murder, but she would be released due to lack of evidence. She bragged about her "innocence" all over Walford and spitefully got in Natalie's face. They begin to fight (culminating in Janine being slapped by a furious Natalie), and she goes from strength to strength and viciously reports Laura for benefits fraud (made all the more worse when she announced it to everyone in the Queen Vic)! After a fight with Laura, the latter dies after a fall down the stairs. Pat refuses to give her an alibi, calling her pure evil. She is once again arrested after it was revealed that she had fought with Laura before her death. She is tried off-screen and was found not guilty, but she leaves Frank in the courtroom. She returns in 2008 for her father's funeral (he had died for real this time) and she is infuriated that she was left out of the will (as had Ricky and the rest of his kids). While Ricky got his father's tool chest, which served a more practical purpose as he was a car mechanic, all she got for her pains was her grandmother, Mo's diary! One of her more cruel turns was where she took her dog Terrence from Tiffany Butcher, making her cry. This was when Pat had thrown her out after goading Tiffany's sister, Whitney Dean (Shona McGarty) to find her birth mother. As such, and again mad for money, she leaves Walford and creates a fictitious name, "Judith Bernstein", played herself off as a nurse (which she had no training for) and she falls in love with an elderly man named David. But, again, it was only a scheme to con someone out of their hard-earned fortune. When Pat crashed the wedding (having sent Ricky and Billy on ahead to see what she was up to), she brought down the house and brought the ceremony to a screeching halt when she announced that the supposedly saintly "Judith" was really Janine and that "she was as Jewish as a Bacon sandwich!" Well! That certainly DID bring things to a screeching halt! During the hurly-burly, which had the rabbi protecting Janine from Ricky and Billy, David would have a heart attack in the sanctuary. He would later die in Hospital. His daughter, Sarah, who found out all about Janine's sordid history (including the murder of Barry Evans; her conning; her scheming and her villainous nature), from Billy, would fight with Janine, yanking her wedding ring off her hand before they got in the ambulance, and then they would row at the hospital. Eventually, Sarah would throw her out of her father's house, with nothing but what she had been dressed in at the wedding! Janine was so infuriated with her family ruining her latest attempt to con someone out of their fortune, that she took a metal pipe to one of Pat's cars at the car lot and was planning on more vandalism. She would also miss out on any of his money (thanks to Sarah) and all she got was a stuffed taxidermy cat! As it turned out, even the gardener, whom Janine looked down her snout at, got more money than she did, which spoke volumes of how hated and how much of a leper she was. She later would fall in love with Peggy's former husband, Archie Mitchell, and with her help, would wrest control of the Vic from Peggy and her family. However, the schemer would be in cahoots with her flat mate and Vic barman, Ryan Malloy to fleece Archie (again for the money). For her effrontery, Archie threw her out. He would later die (after someone, later revealed to be Stacey Slater, shoved the bust of Queen Victoria on top of his hated head), and again, with dollar signs in her eyes, she hoped for being the landlady of the Vic, or getting a hefty amount of money from Archie's estate. That was once again proven to not have been the case, as Roxy gained the bulk of his estate, which included the car lot and also the pub (she promptly reinstated her beloved Auntie Peggy as the landlady) and all Janine got for her pains was a Newton's Cradle (which he willed to her knowing it would drive her mad, to the amusement of Roxy, Ronnie and Phil) and, to add insult to injury, was forcibly ejected from the Vic by an angry Phil. She would do her bit of screaming at the passersby who smirked at the high-and-mighty Janine being tossed out like rubbish. She then glared at the picture of the late and unlamented Archie, hissing, "I LOVED YOU!!!!" She and Ryan would fall in love and eventually marry, but that would sunder when it was revealed that Ryan, who had never loved her, had a tryst with Stacey, whom he DID love, and was revealed to be the father of her newborn daughter, Lily. A very angry Janine would start a feud with Stacey (began when she threw Ryan's clothes out and knocked over Lily's pram, fortunately, the baby wasn't in the pram) and would usually end up on the losing end of the stick. She called the Social Services and filed a false report about Stacey and her bipolar disorder. Janine had already made an enemy of Stacey after a hit and run killed Stacey's best friend, Danielle, which also was the event that triggered Stacey's bipolar disorder. Upon Stacey discovering that Janine had called the Social and lied to them, she slammed the schemer from pillar to post in the Square's garden in full view of the public. Stacey exacted satisfying revenge off of the evil Janine for her conniving. The fight ended when Christian Clarke (John Partridge) pulled Stacey off of Janine, who was very much the worse for wear. Not long after that thrashing, Stacey and her cousin, Kat Moon, would also square off against Janine in the R&R club, where again, Janine would end up defeated. Undaunted, Janine would attempt to kidnap Lily, which only succeeded in pushing Ryan and Stacey closer together. A furious Janine poisons Ryan and lands him in hospital, but he recovers and ends his marriage to Janine upon his release. Janine becomes desperate and tries to keep him in, but she fails. He then declares his love for Stacey in the packed Vic. That would spark an argument between the Butchers and the Slaters, coupled off with Pat slapping Ryan. Angered at what was going on, Janine screams that Stacey had killed Archie (of course she didn't know that she had done so because the perverted Archie raped her) and she shouldn't have Ryan or the child. Everyone ignores her because of no real evidence (and also because of the fact that nobody really liked her anyway). Desperate, she visits Stacey and stabs herself with a butcher knife, intent on making it look as if Stacey had done the deed. For a while, her scheme worked and Stacey was made into a pariah, but the conniving woman did not realize that others knew the truth.....Ryan, most importantly. Ryan, furious that Janine had done this to frame Stacey, tries to kill her himself by yanking her tubes out of her body in hospital, but Ricky and Pat rescue her from her furious former husband. However, Ricky and Pat would have later wished that Ryan had succeeded in killing her, because they turn on her when she reveals that she had stabbed herself in order to frame Stacey. Ricky denounced her in their home and told her that she was dead to him. After the denunciation, Janine sobbed at the foot of the stairs. After all that, Janine would later take in her maternal grandmother, Lydia Simmonds, when she finds out that she is ill, but as always, it was for the ulterior motive of inheriting her money. However, when she dies, Janine discovers that she is the sole heiress of her money, which finally ended her losing streak with wills. Ryan flees Walford, which pleased her. He would return from time to time if only to see Lily. She would begin to lord it all over Walford, using her newfound wealth to buy a property service (which made her a whole raft-load of enemies, including her perennial foe, Roxy Mitchell; as well as threatening her ex's sister, Whitney Dean), and then she would begin to date a man named Michael Moon. He was a cousin of Kat's husband, Alfie. These two would eventually marry, and would have a daughter named Scarlett (although she would change the name to Patricia, after Pat, who had died some months before). The two would fight over her money, her businesses and Scarlett (the fact that he was also cheating on his wife with Alice Branning, a relative of her enemy, Jack Branning, only succeded in making matters worse). The animosity gets to the breaking point where Alice would stab Michael, and thinking he was dead (he wasn't...yet!), answers the door. Meanwhile, Janine would stab him herself, which WOULD kill him! Despite her attempts at what she did best, scheming, lying, blackmail, extortion and manipulations, her efforts to evade justice weren't enough to carry the day to keep her out of custody. When Joey Branning, Alice's brother, tells the police after playing the taped confession that Janine HAD murdered Michael, she was arrested in FULL view of everyone at the Square's annual Christmas party (naturally) and was hauled off by the Old Bill crying and screaming in hysterics, as was always the case with her. She and Alice would be found not guilty for the murder (although it was clear that Janine HAD killed him). Alice would leave Walford for good going back to her mother, which only solidified the anger the Brannings had at Janine; she would go to try to make amends to everyone in the Vic, but, not surprisingly, nobody would have it. Everyone was very hostile to her, but most especially the Branning family, on account of her ruining Alice's life the way she did. Speaking for the family, Carol and Sonia basically told her to leave, as nobody would talk to her, not even her own family. She would finally get the message and she would leave London for good and it would be implied that she would latch on to a young couple whom she met at the airport, who had just won the lottery. Her aim, as usual, was to con them out of their money; some things just never change! Category:EastEnders characters Category:EastEnders villains Category:Fictional con artists Category:Fictional drug addicts Category:Fictional businesspeople